Wednesday, August 19, 1998 Last modified at 12:43 a.m. on Wednesday, August 19, 1998

Brain defects in infants increase along border

BROWNSVILLE (AP) - The incidence of a severe birth defect of newborns' brains is increasing again along the Mexican border, where a cluster in the early 1990s prompted a fruitless search for causes.

Nine cases of neural tube defects were reported in Cameron County as of the end of July, for a rate of 19.94 per every 10,000 live births, according to Texas Department of Health figures. That was up from the 1997 rate of 9.05 and marks the end of a decline since 1994. The national average is 10 per 10,000 live births.

"It may go higher and it may go lower the next couple of months," he said. "We certainly don't want to be alarmist but they are higher than expected, we are concerned and we are watching these."

Health experts have been investigating the prevalence of neural tube defects in infants along the border since 33 children were born with birth defects in 1990 and 1991 in Cameron County, a rate three times higher than the national average.

Most were diagnosed with anencephaly, a fatal condition in which babies are born with undeveloped brains. Three of the nine 1998 cases are anencephaly.

A lawsuit filed in 1993 named 88 owners of about 35 factories in Matamoros as defendants. The suit claimed that air pollution drifted over the border, causing a mysterious cluster of fatal defects.

The companies settled for $17 million before the case went to trial in 1995.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the Texas Department of Health have worked together to monitor the 14 counties along the Texas-Mexico border, and the Texas Neural Tube Defect Project was formed by the TDH to study the problem.

Six of the NTD cases this year were in Brownville, double what the TDH expected.

However, a TDH report noted, "the excess occurrence in February to July of 1998 was not statistically significant."

TDH should keep a close eye on Cameron County to determine if this excess continues."

Paula Gomez, executive director for the Brownsville Community Health Center, said the TDH's figures are suspect.

"It's nice for the TDH to look at everything and say this is not something to worry about," she told The Brownsville Herald. "They play with the statistics and definitions as if it were a chess game."

She noted that most of the department's statistics and the NTDs rate are based on live births and don't take into account babies born dead and fetuses that have been aborted, which might have increased the reported incidence.

Larsen said his department is halfway through a five-year case study of the NTDs along the border. Authorities also have been giving women folic acid, which has been proven to prevent NTDs.

Although most theories about the causes of NTDs are centered around pollution, researchers are also looking to genetic factors.

Mexico has the highest rate of NTDs in the world and the Texas Department of Health is working with Mexico to come up with answers, Larsen said.